It is known that in most processing systems, such as communications systems and computing systems, next generation products typically tend to be more complex as compared with products developed from predecessor technologies. Furthermore, in any such system, there are typically a number of dissimilar processes running on a multitude of dissimilar platforms. When the system works, the results can be impressive. However, when there are capacity issues or failures that can not be attributed to a particular processing device in the system, it is increasingly difficult to quickly isolate errors and resolve problems.
The schemes used by existing processing systems do not adequately address the need to be able to measure the time actually expended in each routine in each processing device under various traffic patterns, as compared to static projections, nor are they able to correlate the processes being simultaneously executed in each of the multiple processing devices in a complex, distributed system.